You didn’t hijack this at all. This is a great conversation.

I’m only slightly older than you (early 30s) so I too am only drawing on a few decades of personal American experience, but I just have a suspicion that there’s always been a certain, small percentage of Americans who are engaged in our politics and the rest either ignore it or only drop in from time-to-time.

What I think is going wrong is not a lack of people engaged in our country but a lack of leadership within specific political communities. The shrill, divisive folks seem to be rising up to the top and that pollutes the entire culture. As for media’s culpability in this, I think they carry a fair amount of the blame–specifically for choosing a market-based approach to the news that rewards high ratings. This may have been inevitable, but that doesn’t mean news producers should be proud by the way they program shows that are nothing more than hour-long shouting matches. Invariably, the best shouters are rewarded with more screen time and more clout.

It’s not good. But we can’t expect the news media to change their habits anytime soon. Instead, we must work from the outside to promote political leaders who will not sucumb to the divisiveness cultivated by the media. While a lot of Americans may enjoy the shouting matches as a kind of political sport, I don’t think most Americans enjoy the polarized culture we now have. A leader who can rise above is very much needed.

Hope we find one.

The decline in news viewership/paper readership is a chicken-and-egg question. Did viewers abandon “hard” news because they wanted entertainment, or did the major news sources shift to softer news and then consumers abandon them?

And actually, which is worse: evening news, which culls what it thinks is news down to thirty minutes, or cable, which doesn’t have 1440 minutes of news to fill so it props up non-news and calls it news? Each is harmful.

I don’t have hard numbers on this one, Alan; I just have a sense that people just aren’t engaged. This goes beyond pithy polls that ask if you can name more freedoms than Simpsons. The proof to me lies in that more and more people are perfectly willing to let parties and pundits think for them rather than make their own decisions. That, I think is worse than it’s been for a very long time. If people were more engaged and informed, I think there’d be more centrists.

Of course, I’m just in my mid-twenties, so my perception of American history takes a short view. (And I’m sorry that I kinda hijacked this thread!)

I will agree that too many Americans aren’t interested in informing themselves or are only interested in informing themselves about the goings on of Jessica Simpson. But I don’t know if the decline in evening news viewership correlates to a decline in our desire to stay informed. From my studies of history (which are admittedly not as robust as other’s on this blog) America has a long and proud history of political ignorance. The decline of the networks is a symptom, I think, of media diversification, not of an increased number of idiots.

As for the blogosphere, you are right that most are useless–God knows I’ve said as much myself. But my point was that the form itself is not inherrently devoid of fact checking. When done right, blogs are well-checked by their readers.

But I’m not saying blogs are any substitute for mainstream media sources. They’re populist punditry sites–very useful but reliant on real journalists to do the heavy lifting.

Of course, the real question here is how do you get more people to be truly engaged in order to make informed choices? I don’t know the answer to that. But I’m pretty sure the evening news isn’t and never was the solution.

No, no one becomes a force of democracy by sitting down for thirty minutes of serious news. They become a force for democracy by wanting to make the effort to inform themselves. By taking the effort, it shows that they’re willing to put a little work into this American experiment.

If the American people were actively informed and engaged in the democratic process, then 527 groups would be useless. People would actually know how their representative voted and what their opponent feels about an issue, because they would have read/watched/heard it directly. That’s far better than having an interested opponent/group shouting at you what they want you to believe the other side said. The fact that Soros/Swift Boats even have success is a sign that people aren’t informing themselves.

There may be more people digging for truth, but there’s even more people shouting hackery at the tops of their lungs. The truthtellers are more drowned out than before. That’s not progress. How much original reporting are blogs doing? Every time it happens, the blogosphere makes a big deal about it, precisely because it’s so rare.

Remeber, Donklephant, TMV, the Reaction, et al, these are exceptions. They are not the rule. If you make a mistake, we’ll politely (more or less) call you on it and we’ll engage in a reasoned discussion about it (like we are right now. For that, incidentally, I’m thankful.) However, that’s not standard operating procedure in non-centrist blogs. Out there, especially in the biggest of the big (Kos/Powerline/LGF/democraticunderground), if you dare to disagree with the commonly accepted line, you’re shouted down, asked why you dared to invade their sacred space, possibly banned and never heard from again.

I’m just scared that as much as the leadup to elections sickens me now, it’s only going to get worse. The root cause appears to me to be people not actively informing themselves. Once that happens, political tricks can sway the voters on things other than issues, which is counter to how this whole mess is going to work.

Joshua: I have to agree with your assessment of two sets of facts prohibiting a common debate. With the riection we’re headed, who knows what the end result will be. All I know is that these are not boring times.

What makes you think that a greater percentage of the public is less informed now than they ever have been? People who want to be informed, stay informed. No one magically becomes a force for democracy by plopping their ass in front of 30 minutes of serious news (when the evening news was serious).

Sure there’s a lot more partisan spin out there now than there was, but there’s a lot more people digging for the truth too. The explosion of news is a great thing for democracy because it increases the amount of information and opinion from which to base one’s own view of the world. Some people are sheep, sure, but that doesn’t mean that we’re a bunch of idiots who can’t properly make decisions without the help of Walter Cronkite.

As for there being no avenue for mistakes to get fixed, most blogs allow comments. And, trust me, if I write something and get my facts wrong, someone will point that out within the hour. You might prefer that fact checking to go on behind closed doors, but it’s no less valid when it goes on in a comments section.

But maybe I’m just one of those Donklephant optimists. Damn half-full glass. :)

Those fimly ensconsed in the blog world tend to understate the problems of that world. Where you see the makers of freedom for news, I see an excessive number of partisan hacks sniping at each other and being read by people who already want to believe whatever it is that those hacks say.

The success of a republic depends on the electorate being informed. Overall, blogs and cable “news” channels are not informing people well. They’re telling them what they want to hear and pretending that they’re the real source of news. How is this different from what you claim of the evening news? It’s worse, becase there’s no accountaiblity, no overarching ethics, no avenue to get mistakes fixed.

This just leads to a stupider electorate that is less likely to vote after choosing for themselves which candidates and issues they wish to support. Instead, they’ll just vote for the candidate whose attack ads work best.

I wish I had the optimism that many of the posters on Donklephant have, but I don’t. Where you see the sinking ship of the evening news, I see the sinking ship of America.